


Strange Dream

by 50s_housewife_with_a_dark_secret



Category: Teletubbies (TV)
Genre: Academia, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Babies, Based on a Tumblr Post, Better Than Canon, Black Markets, Cell Phones, Coffee, Could Be Canon, Cyberpunk, Drabble, Economics, Eldritch, Ethics, Fear of Discovery, Folklore, Giants, Growing Up, Headcanon, Illegal Activities, Imagination, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Modern Era, Must Read, No Smut, Odd, Old Age, Older Characters, One Shot, One of My Favorites, Original Character(s), Other, Power Dynamics, Scotland, Scottish, Short One Shot, Social Issues, Urban Fantasy, Worth Re-Reading, possibly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 11:24:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12958161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/50s_housewife_with_a_dark_secret/pseuds/50s_housewife_with_a_dark_secret
Summary: This is a story not by me, but by the tumblr creator elodie underglass at https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/elodieunderglassI have posted this work here, with her permission, as I think it represents excellent literature and deserves to be preserved on multiple formats.





	Strange Dream

So I had the strangest dream this weekend and nobody understands me so I need to share it with you because you might. Press J to skip this post if you can’t deal, I will accept this.

In my dream I was standing on the back deck of a rural cabin that overlooked a beautiful Vermont/Scottish Highlands landscape of unspoiled wilderness. It was a crisp, perfect autumn morning. I held a cup of cooling coffee in my hands as I leaned against the railing and scanned the perfect rolling hills in the midground, behind which the great patterned mountains with their snowcaps marched on until they blended with the horizon: #aesthetic

As I gazed at a distant meadow clearing in the trees, a pair of brightly coloured humanoid creatures emerged from the woods and began to dance for each other. It was an esoteric, beautiful mating dance, a strange combination of instinct and choreography. I felt awe washing over me. I marvelled. I felt a deep sense of wonder and peace as I observed this vanishingly rare encounter that I had never thought to observe in person. These animals were instantly recognisable but had never been studied in the wild. I felt incredibly humbled and privileged to witness this behaviour - I knew that I was the first human witness to observe this behaviour - and I reached for my phone, wondering if I should film it, so it could join the scholarly record, where it NEEDED to be. This could change everything. But then I held back - something told me “no,” to let the creatures have their privacy.

 

Ok, I can’t go any further without telling you that they were Teletubbies.

 

A red one and a yellow one. I know. I know. Stay with me here.

The cryptids melted back into the woods. My subconscious drew a discreet veil over the rest of their mating ritual, but I knew instinctively that this had been a dance of courtship. I was busy pondering the implications, because they were critical. You see, although the creatures were instantly recognisable as Teletubbies, as I had studied them, even at a distance, I had an incredible realisation.

 

They were  _adult_  Teletubbies.

 

This realisation dawned on me and in my dream I understood it fully. The ones that we know of - the captive ones that we have seen on television - are juveniles. In fact, they are the equivalent of toddlers. When you see the adults this becomes obvious. The garbled speech and silly movements of the four captive Teletubbies we know are the babbles of babyhood, a private primal toddler-language brewed up between sentient beings who have never encountered an adult of their own kind.

The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.

In my dream my feelings of awe and peace turned to great sadness at the fate of the captive toddler Teletubbies. I realised that I had to be the scientist who brought this discovery to the world and raised awareness of their plight. And I also questioned: are Teletubbies like axolotls? Do they exhibit neoteny? (Axolotls, the cute aquarium pets with flaring gills, are actually juveniles of an amphibious species - if given the right conditions they’ll grow up into land-dwelling black newts. But they can breed in their aquatic juvenile form, and most spend their whole lives in this form. Deprived of their wild potential, will the Teletubbies ever mature? Or are they merely experiencing a long childhood, natural for a species that is unimaginably long-lived?)

So in my dream my husband came out onto the back deck and I began to share these discoveries with him and before I could even bring up the axolotls he just said “what the  _fucking_  fuck” and went away again.

I woke up disgruntled and unable to capture the feeling of peace and sadness. I then tried to explain this to my husband in the waking world, and he said “ _what the fucking fuck_ ” and walked away before I even got to the explanation of the Teletubbies being toddlers, which just goes to show that you never know someone as well as you think you do.

Anyway I’m sure you guys will join me in this knowledge. And also I’ve googled it and apparently the Teletubbies reboot features infant Teletubbies, so clearly they are getting more from somewhere and the time to question this is NOW

**Author's Note:**

> As someone who loves Sci-fi this is honestly one of my favorite sci-fi stories. It has a grain of truth to it when it comes to the corporate/entertainment landscape and the abuse of intelligent primates.The absurdity of the teletubbies original show only further underlines the debasement and mockery of the beings for corporate greed and cheap, insulting entertainment for the masses, evocative even of the mockery of those with deformities in sideshows. it’s sci-fi at it’s best, a description of the slights committed against an odd and alien being/beings with somewhat gothic undertones that echo back to the origins of the genre. I am a huge fan of this story.


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